Files in this package

Content in the Dryad
Digital Repository is offered "as is." By downloading files, you agree
to the Dryad Terms of Service.
To the extent possible under law, the authors have waived all copyright
and related or neighboring rights to this data.

Title

Tested birds

Downloaded

18 times

Description

Birds were sampled in the wild in four biogeographic regions (Region): NWA - Northwest Africa, NWI - Northwest Iberia, TRC - Transcaucasia, WGC - Western Greater Caucasus. Bird ID is the unique identifier for each bird sampled. Repeated bird IDs indicate multiple infections in the same bird. Date is when the sample was taken in the field. Parasite lineage is a unique identifier and 'none' indicates that no haemosporidian parasite lineages were found. Please see the original article for details of methods.

The data file is a FASTA alignment of unique haemosporidian lineages identified in the bird samples. The name of each lineage corresponds to the parasite lineage identifier used in the manuscript and associated files. Lineages are identified to genus when species identification was not possible.

AbstractTwo hypotheses have been proposed to explain the abundance-occupancy relationship (AOR) in parasites. The niche-breadth hypothesis suggests that host generalists are more abundant and efficient at colonizing different host communities than specialists. The trade-off hypothesis argues that host specialists achieve high density across their hosts’ ranges, whereas generalists incur the high cost of adaptation to diverse immuno-defense systems. We tested these hypotheses using 386 haemosporidian cytochrome-b lineages (1894 sequences) recovered from 2318 birds of 103 species sampled in NW Africa, NW Iberia, W Greater Caucasus, and Transcaucasia. The number of regions occupied by lineages was associated with their frequency suggesting the presence of AOR in avian Haemosporidia. However, neither hypothesis provided a better explanation for the AOR. Although, the host-generalist Plasmodium SGS1 was over 3 times more abundant than other widespread lineages, both host specialists and generalists were successful in colonizing all study regions and achieved overall high prevalence.